Another detail has emerged in the ongoing saga, in the middle of a recession/depression, which has seen the most commonly used source of public sector funding for Irish artisan food businesses dry up.

You can see the background to this story here and here – however the headline of this post relates to a detail in a blog post yesterday (Sunday) from the CEO of the Kilkenny Leader Partnership in which he states:

“But in summary- let’s just state that LEADER was under the false impression that it could fund food projects from its allocated funding from ‘axis 3’ of the Rural Development Programme (RDP), until queries were raised from an Irish ‘third party’, revealed that most food projects can only be funded from another part of the overall RDP- ‘axis 1’ which has no funding for food in it. Got that?”

The good news element of his post is that there could be a resolution by August. Hopefully.

But the idea that an Irish organisation (I have heard rumours of just whom that was but am certainly not going to share them here) was responsible for this by deliberately and directly intervening is disgraceful.

Why am I writing about this here? Because many of the Irish artisan brands whom I admire are hit by this craziness.

Keith